Fantasy Freestyle

Other Competitive Balance Mechanisms

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Last week, I talked about salary caps in auction-style leagues and how they can still allow non-contending teams to rebuild without destroying the integrity of your league. As many of my readers have pointed out, there are several other methods you can use to either curb dump trades or prevent them entirely if you so desire. Over the years, I have used some of these methods in my carryover leagues. Others I have not used but have heard about through either reader feedback or from other fantasy baseball analysts who also play in keeper leagues. The list below is not intended to be comprehensive but offers a guide to different ways you can navigate this issue in your league or leagues.

Salary Floor
A salary cap addresses how much salary a contender may put on his or her roster, but does little if anything to discourage a team at the bottom of the pack from simply vacating its roster and shipping everyone away to another squad. An alternative suggested by many of my readers is a salary floor. Putting a minimum required salary on a team still allows teams to play for next year but prevents teams from simply jettisoning everyone off of their rosters and potentially disrupting the competitive balance of the league.

Advantages: Curtails the most lopsided present-for-future trades while still allowing for these types of deals. Prohibits teams out of the running from simply jettisoning expensive non-keepers off of their rosters after the trade deadline and allowing contenders with the most FAAB or highest waiver claims to swoop in post deadline.

Disadvantages: This method is by no means foolproof. Teams can get around this by using FAAB to obtain an expensive player or players to reach the floor. It is also possible to acquire an expensive bust to simply circumvent the rule. In 2014, think Prince Fielder or Justin Verlander. Dragging a $30-35 Fielder out there week in and week out wouldn’t be palatable to a contender but in a league with a salary floor would be perfectly acceptable.

Salary Escalators
A player traded during the season with a salary under a certain amount would see his salary rise to an agreed upon minimum salary. Ten dollars is sometimes used but for maximum impact $15 is probably a better minimum. For example, Dallas Keuchel was purchased for four dollars at your auction this past March. He is traded during the 2014 season to a non-contender. His salary jumps to $15 for this year and next year as well.

Advantages: Teams can still play for next year but the number of players targeted in trades with future value plummets. Elite players would still have future value under this rule but cheap, marginal keepers who are often used to justify some of the most egregious dump trades would lose their value.

Disadvantages: Curtails trading. Teams in the second division might simply not deal with contenders if they cannot get enough future value if a salary escalator minimizes or eliminates the value of a future chip.

Penalizing Teams at the Bottom of the Standings
One way to try to encourage every team to be at least somewhat competitive is to penalize teams at the bottom of the standings. There are several different types of penalties that leagues can use, including but not limited to:

Reducing the number of freezes

Deducting future FAAB

Deducting future auction money or draft position

Financial penalty

Lower pick in a farm (minor league) draft

Penalties of this nature can be applied to either the last place team only or teams in the bottom three or four in the standings. Instead of using order of finish, another idea is to use a point threshold for a penalty. For example, in Tout Wars AL and NL, teams finishing with less than 60 overall points lose one dollar in FAAB for every point below 60; a team finishing with 52 points would have $92 FAAB the following season instead of $100.

Advantages: More than any other rule mechanism, implementing penalties for teams finishing at the bottom of the standings or below a certain point threshold gives everyone at least some incentive to play for this season. Weighing how important a strategic disadvantage the following season is versus how much benefit you can receive via trade can add a strategic wrinkle for teams out of contention. Is trading away two studs at cost for an underpriced Manny Machado worth losing two freezes next year?

Disadvantages: If you prefer to punish process as opposed to results, rules like this will fail to accomplish this goal. There are some teams that make every effort to contend and through mostly bad luck simply fail to finish in the first division. Penalizing teams in the second division can artificially create a hierarchy of winners and losers, where the teams at the top are given an unfair advantage against weaker opponents year in and year out.

Eliminate Minor League Speculation
One of the biggest sources of debates in keeper leagues is when a non-contender trades two or three productive major league players for a minor leaguer. Even if the minor leaguer is someone great like Addison Russell, trades like this can still leave a bad aftertaste. “But Russell will be great someday” doesn’t change the fact that in the here and now the owner who had Russell is likely to win the league.

To counteract this, some leagues don’t allow for minor leaguers to be kept from season to season. There are different ways to do this, but the two most common ways are either not to allow for farm systems or to allow only for reserve lists and to force fantasy owners to activate minor leaguers before the end of the season.

Advantages: If you want to have the ability to bid on players like Russell—whether via FAAB if he is called up during the regular season or at your auction if his first exposure to the majors is on the Opening Day roster—then this rule is right up your alley. Otherwise, farm players typically start out with a very low salary and in leagues with long-term contracts are often taken out of the pool for as long as they are in the minors plus their first five years in the majors. If you Russell’s owner, this can be a lot of fun, but it isn’t much fun for the other owners in the league. From a dumping perspective, if Russell’s initial salary is his first auction or FAAB price, it is very likely that you have eliminated him as a low priced trade chip. In many leagues, it is cheap minor leaguers, rookies, or second-year players who are the most coveted and part of the most imbalanced trades.

Disadvantages: Taking away minor league drafts or farm systems takes away the fun of the game for many (including most of the current staff of Baseball Prospectus and the growing number of dynasty league players who read our site). While this mechanism can work very well, why shouldn’t an owner who avidly reads the prospect articles at BP who is savvy enough to pick up the next big thing two years before his arrival be rewarded for good research?

Reduce Contract Time (The “Topper” Rule)
Unless you’re in a dynasty league, there is a limit to how long you can keep a player. Still, these limits often aren’t particularly prohibitive, and depending upon the structure of your league you can keep an active major league player for anywhere from 5-7 years depending on how your league structures long-term deals. The justification for dealing three top players for a cheap Anthony Rizzo isn’t difficult when you know you are getting 5-7 years of a cost-controlled Rizzo.

Some leagues use what is known as the Topper Rule. A player can be kept at his auction salary the following season but there are no long-term contracts. Instead, his owner only has the rights to “top” the player’s auction salary by one in the following year’s auction. So if an owner bought Devin Mesoraco at four dollars in 2013 and then kept him at the same salary in 2014, he would not be able to give Mesoraco a contract at the beginning of 2015. Instead, he would have the right to outbid any owner in the 2015 auction by $1 if he still wanted to keep Mesoraco.

Advantages: It is much more difficult to justify making a lopsided trade for a cheap player if the sole benefit is that you are only going to get one undervalued year of that player. Future trades for players entering what was once a contract year will be eliminated entirely.

Disadvantages: With fewer players under cheap team control, the market value of cheap players in the first year of a fantasy contract will only increase. If the 2013 version of Mesoraco is one of the best options available on the trade market, why wouldn’t a team out of the running give up multiple players for him? The law of unintended consequences could apply here depending on your league. Taking players out of the future market will only increase the price of the few remaining players with next year value.

Can These Rules Work?
As noted above, I have firsthand experience with some of these rules. In other instances, I only have only read about these rules or talked to other fantasy players who use these rules.

In my experience, if you are allowed to carry even one player from season to season, you will still see lopsided present for future trades. Rules like most of those outlined above will make it more difficult for a non-contending team to build a future winner via dump trades but will not necessarily stop the trades from happening. Often, a team out of the running will make the trades anyway in an attempt to obtain any kind of future value. In some cases, the unintended consequences of these types of rules is that the dump trades will be worse, since the non-contending team will obtain less in future value but feel that any future value in a trade is better than no future value.

Mechanisms that penalize the bottom feeders can have a dampening effect on dump deals. However, as noted above this is not always necessarily the case. A fantasy team might consider the cost/benefit of completing a dump deal versus not making a deal and still come out on the side of making a trade.

I have a distaste for giving up and playing for next year and try to avoid it whenever possible, but I dislike the idea of rules designed to mandate my fantasy philosophy and force everyone else to comply. Some fantasy players prefer to build and build and attempt to contend every three or even every four years. This type of approach has often worked to my advantage, as teams that get caught in the cycle of the future seldom ever achieve any kind of success in the present.

If your league finds that present for future deals are utterly distasteful, the best thing to do is to play in a non-carryover league. Short of making every traded player contract expire at the end of the year, it is difficult to legislate dump deals to the point where they will not happen. Smart fantasy players will find the loopholes and make these trades regardless of the rules. Some of the challenge of navigating a keeper league is figuring out how to work the trading climate to your advantage and put yourself in the best position to win. I am a proponent of fewer freezes, but only so my auctions can be more exciting and allow for more choices in the player pool. If I wanted to get rid of dump trades, I would stop playing in keeper leagues. After years of getting aggravated over present for future deals, I have accepted the fact that I prefer keeper leagues to non-keeper, and that building for the future is simply part of the game.

This something we did several years ago. We set our unlimited trade deadline at the All-Star break. After that, teams can only trade two players between each team until the final trade deadline the second Monday in August (the first Monday being the final FAAB bidding cycle).

We also put in a financial penalty to the last three standings finishers and made the reserve round picks the following year 5-11, 4, 3, 2, 1. That gave some incentive to trying to finish strong even when out of the money.

Does it work? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Dumping does tend to happen earlier as a result. Mike's final sentence sums up my attitude about our history of dump trades perfectly.

I'll reiterate from the previous article that the in-season salary cap and floor works exceptionally well in my league. To Mike's point about dead salary (e.g. prince this year), we have a clause that once a player goes on the DL, his salary can only count towards the floor to his owner at the time he goes on the DL. This prevents any accounting-type shenanigans because once Prince (in our example) hits the DL, he can no longer count for anyone else's salary floor.

Expensive busts that are not DL'ed are very few and far between.

We've found that this enables dump trades, but it's not excessive. Also, we use salary escalators that are far more modest than the ones Mike described; $3 raise per year.

Finally, minor leaguers, when traded in-season, automatically get activated, so they take up a major league (and keeper the following year) spot, so you lose almost all incentive to acquire them. In order for there to be integrity, minor leaguers really do need to be off limits.

I have been a very active member of my 14-team, mixed, H2H league this year. However, due to unlucky results and some bad strategy, my team is floundering.

Our max keeper duration is only 3 years and we only have 5 keepers total. I just traded Jose Abreu (2 years left) plus Mat Latos (1 year left) for Paul Goldschmidt (1 year left) plus Javier Baez and Taijuan Walker (both with 2 years). The trade was made with the guy in second place, who offered the deal.

It was a desperate gamble move for of us. He loses potential future production (aside from Abreu, none of his elite players have keeper eligibility remaining). I am banking on high-end production from the young guys within the next two+ years. His line after the deal was agreed to was, "I was almost hoping you'd reject it....".

This is as close to a 'dump deal' as we have seen in our league, but it comes with tremendous upside (along with risk). Our league (being H2H) allows for a loser's bracket in the playoffs, with the winner of that winning some cash back. However, the bottom two teams are left completely out of the playoffs (winners and losers); so there is still a compulsion to keep on fighting.

I generally prefer Roto leagues to H2H, but with our "loser's bracket" playoff, the number of dump trades in this league is virtually non-existent.

I like something that sets things up so that the best team not in the playoff gets the top pick/reward rather than the worst team. That makes dumping less profitable.

In a snake draft you can just draft 6-12 then 5-1 like you did. If you had a $260 auction you could modify the auction amounts so 6 gets $270, 7th $268, 8th $266 ... 12th $258, 5th $256 etc. (make it wider or shorter as you like).

This small bump helps with competitive balance (the stronger owners, and teams with best keepers, get less draft money), and it also gives teams out of the playoffs some small thing to play for (more money next year).

A league I played in used a "salary trade cap" or "team-to-team cap"; that is, it limited the amount of salary one team could pick up from another. Inevitably in every keeper league there's going to a group of contenders and a group of non-contenders. What rankles everyone and causes the most hurt feelings is the "dump everyone to one team and get it over with" trade, and the salary trade cap solves this problem by essentially forcing a dumping team to deal with more than one contender. It thereby allows non-contenders to rebuild and contenders to acquire help while spreading things around.

The league also had no long-term contracts, but required any player being kept to have his salary bumped up $4 each year. This kept down draft inflation pretty well, by increasing the amount of salary kept and by throwing more marginal keepers back in the draft (someone at $21 might be a keeper but at $25 they're not).

I don't really understand the complaints about these sorts of trades, unless you have a farm-team effect where one owner only really trades with another specific owner. Even then, I think it's a bit silly to worry about it - if everyone thinks it's a bad thing, they will form their own coalitions.

To me, the more important problem is concentration of talent. You shouldn't be doing things to make it harder for the worse teams to get cheap talent, you should be making it easier. Something like the old free agent compensation rule seems more appropriate. Like, if you choose not to keep a player who was on your roster at the start of the previous year, you get to spend an extra 10% (or 25%) of his salary in the draft. Or with cut-offs: if you don't keep a $10+ player, you get $3 extra to spend, $20+, you get $6, etc. So now you aren't looking at a player with 0 value to you vs whatever someone will offer, you are looking at a player with a minimum value to you so any decent offer has to exceed that value.

My league uses a flat salary appreciation ($465 total budget for 30 players, anyone can be kept at their draft salary + $7, draft salary = 0 if they were undrafted), which ends up being a fairly harsh drag against all but the absolute best bargains. Looking at the 2009 draft, there are 11 players who have been kept every year (meaning that they were considered worth it at $28 + their 2009 draft salary). Most of them were either $1 guys that year (Latos, CarGo, Strasburg), or cheap keepers from the prior year (Kershaw, Hamilton, Pence, Votto, Cano, Cliff Lee). The other two were Verlander and Cabrera. Also, Beltre, Posey, Price, Adam Jones, and Carlos Santana were picked up after the draft and kept since. So that's 16 players out of 256 (counting the DL slots, it's an 8-team league) after 5 years. It has the effect of making borderline keepers pretty low value, but its really organic and flexible. You can make a bet on a Xander (who was drafted at $7 prior to the 2013 season) and just stick to it looking for that payoff, you can double-down on guys like Cabrera (kept at $58 this year) and Darvish (kept at $64), or you can bargain-hunt the auction ($9 Cole Hamels? $10 John Lester?), or you can stash all the prospects and see who shakes out (Gausman, Stroman, Bryant, Rymer, Walker, CMart, Odorizzi, Heaney, Salazar, Miller?). There's decisions all up-and-down the cost spectrum.